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Category: World History

I’ve been reading a fascinating book recently – it’s called The Third Millennium, by Brian Stapleford and David Langford. It’s basically a speculative history of the years 2000 to 3000. What’s really interesting is that it was written in the 1980s; and yet they’ve been pretty accurate with their technological predictions – the internet, the […]

At Church on Sunday, our minister made a point which I hadn’t considered before. And as a historian maybe I should have done. It being the season of Advent, she was talking about the coming of Jesus into the world. And she said that each of the four gospels started their narrative at a different […]

A verse in Psalm 135, in the Old Testament, goes, “[God] struck down many nations, and killed mighty kings. – Sihon, king of the Amorites, and Og, king of Bashan….”. Sihon and Og were clearly seen as great rulers in their time. Today, however, apart from tiny walk-on parts in the Bible, they are completely […]

My reading of world history tells me that the saying, “Be careful what you wish for – you might get it!”, can be as true for nations as it is for individuals. Britain against France The British comprehensively defeated the French in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63). In US history this is known as the […]

By time of fall of the Babylonian empire to the Persians, in 539 BC, the civilization of ancient Mesopotamia had lasted for some three thousand years. It can be divided into different periods, the major ones being the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian. Some historians view these as distinct civilizations, but there was such […]

Now here’s a question – what exactly is a civilization? This is a harder question than you might think, and I’ve tackled it before, both in a blog post and an encyclopedia article. However, my answers there do not take into account a further question I sometimes mull. Look at this map of Europe in […]

If you’re a westerner, probably not. Who was he? Some obscure person who had a walk-on part in Chinese history? If you’re Chinese, you certainly will have heard of him: he has a large claim to being the most famous person in your country’s long history. So who, actually, was he? Well, he founded the […]

Unlike other great civilizations in world history, such as those of China or India, Western civilization has experienced a series of transformational changes which each fundamentally altered the very nature of Western civilization itself